Vladimir Ashkenazy: Piano & Chamber Box Set

• 56 CDs in original jackets spanning Ashkenazy’s 50+ years career on Decca
• Every recording personally selected by the artist
• This collection is pooled from a vast recorded repertoire of over 150 solo and chamber recordings and represents a number of long unavailable items
• Includes the first international CD release of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition in its original coupling with Russian miniatures
• Features collaborations with artists such as Itzhak Perlam, Lynn Harrell and Elisabeth Söderström, with whom he enjoyed particularly long and fruitful collaborations, both on record and in the concert hall
• Includes a deluxe presentation hardback book with new essay by critic Jed Distler

HIGHLIGHTS
This collection includes certain long unavailable recordings. At the same time, a strong personal connection informs Ashkenazy’s choices, from his affinity to Rachmaninov, Tchaikovsky and Chopin to his fondness for Ravel, Prokofiev and his long-time friend Howard Blake. Then there are the inspired collaborations with Previn, Perlman, Harrell and Söderström, the latter whom he called “the sunshine of my generation”.
In the chamber and song recitals, Ashkenazy’s sensitive, nuanced and perfectly balanced performances reveal him at once as both a masterful pianist and a sympathetic one: exampled in the Rachmaninov and Tchaikovsky songs with Söderström, the Brahms Horn Trio with Tuckwell and Perlman and the Beethoven Cello Sonatas with Harrell.
Other highlights include the Bach Preludes and Fugues which stand their ground alongside the recordings of more “specialized” interpreters, and more recent recordings of Blake’s Walking in the Air and Shostakovich’ Piano Trios with Visontay and Lidstöm. Ashkenazy also gives listeners the opportunity to compare multiple versions of Schumann’s C Major Fantasie Op. 17, Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit, Brahms’ Horn Trio and Prokofiev’s Seventh and Eighth Sonatas, recorded decades apart.